TON blockchain slows to a halt as Ordinals-inspired protocol sees surge in activity

The open network ( TON

+1.06%
) blockchain saw major delays in transaction processing earlier this week after the introduction of a Bitcoin Ordinals-inspired protocol that saw a spike in activity.

According to reports from TON developers and users in Telegram, the problems started on Tuesday. More than 2.5 million transactions were pending as of Thursday afternoon data from the dTON bot that monitors the state of the blockchain.

The speed on the blockchain has dropped to less than 1 transaction per second dTON. That’s a fraction of TON’s maximum speed that was reportedly measured 100,000 TPS during a ‘public stress test’ in early November.

The congestion has been so severe that the most popular wallets for the TON cryptocurrency, Wallet and Tonkeeper, have temporarily suspended their services.

“By producing more than 2 million transactions, our network usage increased 61 times in just half an hour,” says a after in the TON Community Telegram channel with more than one million subscribers.

TONS of ordinal numbers

The congestion followed the launch of Tonano, a blockchain inscription creation service inspired by Bitcoin Ordinals and using the TON20 token standard on the TON blockchain. Tonano launched the project on Monday, but had to stop minting the project on Thursday said on X.

According to a technical report posted anonymously on the Telegraph blogging platform on Thursday, the reason for the congestion was attributed to “validator nodes running on weak hardware”.

“These validators were renting low-load hardware with no provision for load growth. Since the network had been running at low load for the past few months, this wasn’t a problem. Once the load increased 50 to 100 times in 30 minutes, validators started hitting the entire network with it slow down,” he said after reads, adding that a patch has been released to fix the issue, and that tougher penalties will be introduced for lagging validators in the future.

Inscriptions and the way they have flooded the blockchain with data are a… controversial topic in the Bitcoin community, where the format was first introduced. Recently, the format was also introduced on the Polygon blockchain, where it took care of transaction volumes increase but did not stop the blockchain.

Telegram’s blessing

TON blockchain started as a project piloted by the team behind Telegram, crypto’s favorite messaging app. The white paper was written by Nikolay Durov, brother of Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram.

The project raised $1.7 billion through a closed token sale in 2018, but that also happened indicted by the Securities and Exchange Commission for an alleged unregistered sale of securities. Telegram eventually settled with the SEC, and in May 2020 the company was officially incorporated to leave the project.

The project’s developer community and Telegram’s former technical partner TON Labs picked up the code and developed two competing projects, Toncoin (now TON) and Free TON (now Everscale).

Telegram will be officially launched in September endorsed TON and built the wallet for the coin into the messenger app’s interface for users outside the US